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A Tale of Two Sitcoms [Part 1]

Image via tvguide.com

One Hundred Fifty-Two Episodes. That’s apparently how long it took for me to get over How I Met Your Mother. This isn’t a snap judgement on one episode that was torn apart on Twitter. Certainly, “Drunk Train” smacked of desperation, going back to an old staple from the glory days (Ted and Robin together).

Of course, this series won me over with its structure. When my pal Billy first threw in the season one DVD, he described it as “the Lost of sitcoms”: a show that paid a lot of attention to the serialization in storytelling that has been a staple of all my favorite shows for a couple of decades. How I Met Your Mother wasn’t just focused on the big mystery. Everything was layered and had an eye on the future and respect for what came beforehand.

The main problem isn’t the ongoing mystery about the mother… well not entirely. For three years now, I’ve argued that they could have just introduced the mother and continued telling the story of these friends being hilarious in New York. On the other side of the argument, they could completely ignore the search for the mother for weeks or months at a time and just continue making the show that was so great back when Ted and Robin were together the first time. Either way… the point is to be funny, something this series hasn’t been consistently in a long while.

Last season did have a pair of stories that were well told and wonderfully performed: Jason Segal overcoming the death of Marshall’s dad and Neil Patrick Harris dealing with meeting Barney’s dad. Of course, neither of the plots made me laugh all that much.

There’s no one cause for the show not being consistently funny anymore. Were Carter Bays and Craig Thomas switched out with pod people? More than that, the structure has devolved. Now it seems like the only point of the ongoing story is to introduce one big clue in each season finale and proceed to obscure that revelation in the next season’s pilot: a never-ending shell game that has been extended beyond reason.

The other serious issue is the inability of the writers to expand the cast. Since the early days of Stella, peripheral characters have been largely mishandled, mostly ignored, or set up as punching bags. Nora, Kevin, Zoey and Don all could have expanded the cast and added a new dimension (or at least been three dimensional supporting characters), which is something sitcoms need after awhile. Despite Kevin being around longer than most, little was really done to ingratiate him into the group beyond his role as Robin’s accessory.

How much did the addition of Adam Scott and Rob Lowe help propel Parks and Recreation to another level? At this point we’ve seen Ted, Marshall, Lily, Barney and Robin in every conceivable pairing a few times now and things grew stale a while ago.

All that being said, I’m trapped. I think a lot of fans are. We’ve already invested too many hours, and we’re in for the long haul. Perhaps that’s just some sour grapes that will make us even more bitter as time goes on, but this show used to be one of the best and most consistently funny shows on television. Even this year the occasional gem came along (“Ducky Tie” and “The Slutty Pumpkin Returns” to name a couple), and no show with Neil Patrick Harris and Jason Segel could be all bad. But even enjoying an episode now and then won’t stop me from missing the glory days (Seasons 1-4) that really seem to be gone for good.